What has happened to the script?

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The lads from the Script are celebrating a journey that has included six number one Irish albums, five UK number one albums, six billion streams, and over two million ticket sales with a Greatest Hits Tour.

They’ve had iconic hits like “Hall of Fame” (featuring Will.i.am) and the Top 10 hit “The Man Who Can’t Be Moved”, “For The First Time” and “Superheroes”.

Their landmark music also includes “Breakeven”, their debut single “We Cry” and “Rain”.

Read more: Inside Ken Doherty's €2.5m south Dublin home as he sells property after split from wife

Their tour honours everything that the trio - Danny O’Donoghue, Glen Power and Mark Sheehan - have achieved together since 2007.

Their latest album: “The ‘Tales From The Script’ album is a springboard to our next chapter, but it’s also our story so far,” according to Danny and they’re “so excited to be taking it on the road. I know I’m gonna lose it on stage, night after night.”

Their three homecoming performances will be at the 3Arena on 14, 15 and 16 of June.

But who are the Dublin lads and what success have they had worldwide? Here's everything you need to know.

Who are The Script's Danny O’Donoghue, Mark Sheehan and Glen Power?

The Script is made up of musicians Danny O’Donoghue on lead vocals and the keyboard, Mark Sheehan as lead guitarist and Glen Power as drummer.

People may know Dublin-born lead singer Danny O'Donoghue from his time judging The Voice UK during its first two series on the BBC.

The band formed in the early noughties and released their first EP in 2005, before their debut album came out in 2008, peaking at number one in the UK charts.

Danny O'Donoghue and Mark Sheehan go back a long way and have been best friends since the age of 12, and were originally part of boy band Mytown, which formed in 1996 and was created by Louis Walsh.

They later recruited drummer Glen Power, who had played since he was eight, for their new band The Script.

Where did they get their name?

Danny and Mark were living in LA when they came up with the name of the band. Everyone was always talking about film scripts so they would ring each other and say "what’s the script'?" instead of "what’s the craic?".

The power behind their music writing

The song 'If You Could See Me Now' is written in memory of O'Donoghue's father, Shay, who died of a stomach aneurysm in 2008. A rose tattoo on his left arm commemorates the date.

Danny O'Donoghue and Mark Sheehan have even produced songs for performers including Britney Spears, Boys II Men and TLC.

Why does Glen not drink?

In 2012, following a night out partying, drummer Glen Power nearly fainted in front of 16,000 fans during a gig in Birmingham. Power decided to give up drinking after the show and is now tee-total.

The Scripts royal fan

The Queen asked to watch the Script play during a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge performance. The group played David Bowie's Heroes, however, contentious lyrics in the song meant it had to be given the Royal seal of approval before being performed.

She is also a fan of The Voice and one of the Queen's aides apparently told the group she was a fan of the BBC show, which Danny is a former judge on.

A few years ago, Danny O’Donoghue was on a flight to London. He told stories to a fellow passenger in his usual entertaining, expletive-laden manner. When the plane pulled up to the landing gate, the woman in the seat behind him stood up to get her bag from the overhead compartment. Smiling, Mary Robinson said to him: “I love your music, but your language is foul.”

The fact that The Script, of which O’Donoghue is lead singer, has sold over 12 million albums worldwide would suggest that its more than just the former president who enjoys the music.

Now, O’Donoghue, guitarist Mark Sheehan and drummer Glen Power are set to release a greatest-hits album, Tales From The Script. This will be followed, next year, by a European tour, which includes a massive show at The O2 in London in June, plus two dates at the 3Arena in Dublin the same month.

Working on a greatest-hits album gives many musicians pause to look back over their careers, and O’Donoghue is certainly in a reflective mood when we speak — looking back not just over the enormous success of the band, but his own path and the challenges of the pandemic.

“I have had to meet myself,” he says. “I had to look at myself hard in the mirror and really try to find out who I am.” And who are you? “I’m just somebody trying to get on like everybody else. I’m broken on the inside. It doesn’t matter how much money, or how much success you have to make you think that it is happiness. It is not happiness.”

“I’m very strong about my emotions,” he continues. “I am able to say I am weak a lot of time, and that I am broken inside. Who else is? Put your hand up.”

No grinning self-promoter, O’Donoghue talks instead with the wide-eyed intensity of an Old Testament preacher. It’s poetry rather than preaching that’s in his lineage, however.

“I’m from five generations of poets from the O’Donoghue side and I have a few soldier poets in there as well on the McLoughlin side,” he says referencing ‘The Bard of Howth’ Pearse McLoughlin, who was uncle to O’Donoghue’s late mother, Ailish.

Music is O’Donoghue’s poetic outlet. “I’m trying to understand the human condition by trying to understand how I feel on the inside and get that out through a piece of art. I haven’t really got a fully formed answer, but if you are asking me to sum myself up, everything that has ever gone on in my life is music. When I’m happy, I make music. When I’m sad, I make music.”

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The Script photographed by Kevin Westenberg. From left, Glen Power, Danny O'Donoghue, and Mark Sheehan

His songs are, he says, his best attempt “at what it feels like to be inside-out. This is the only way to explain what pain is. We can all look at music and say that’s what pain sounds like.”

Has he known pain in his life? “We had an absolute tragedy very close to my family where a young baby — a two-month-old — died. I sang at the funeral.” In the following years, he would sing at the funerals of both of his parents. “Music is my way of dealing with things.”

O’Donoghue believes it is important for parents, teachers, priests, people in the community, to “teach kids that there is a place where you can put your pain, your angst, your anxiety and this anger that modern-day society gives them. This generation has a lot of anxiety from very early on. The kids I meet are so consumed with being online and accepted in a fake world. A fake world of a billion digital hearts. I’d love to have one regular, normal heartbeat in the room beside me as opposed to f**king 10,000 digital ones any day”.

Aside from music, he puts his own anger into kickboxing, which he practices for an hour every day. “I’m 44 years old — level four! I still wake up in the morning with something. I don’t know what it is. I need to go smash pads in kickboxing and get some anger out. I know I’m not the only one.”

He has been aware of needing a way to release his emotions since he was very young.

“This goes back to my dad, who was a musician and a singer. We came from Ballinteer. We were working class. [There were] six kids.” Danny was the youngest behind Ian, Mandy, Dara, Vicky, and Andrea in a small house in south Dublin suburbia.

“So, I slept on a mattress on the ground in the downstairs back room, which was the music room. There was a piano and drums in the corner with a guitar. My brother [Dara] was in the Big Geraniums. My other brother [Ian] was in Revelino or Crocodile Tears. My dad wrote songs.

“So, we always had about 30 people back in the house, jamming, until all hours. So, I’ve seen old men crying their eyes out, singing ballads. I’ve seen hard-chaw men reduced to tears by my dad playing Mise Éire on piano. That was my experience really early on. I understood that there was a magic to music.”

His intensity of thought is intriguing. I wonder what goes on in his head late at night?

“Everything. It used to be the bigger the thought, the better I felt about it. ‘How can we do this? How can we change this? How can we make the whole of Ireland feel this? How can we make everyone in the world hear a song?’ I realise there is not one single song that is going to change the world.”

So what’s the alternative? “You have to change your own four walls. You have to change your own self. If you had asked me this question before Covid-19, it would probably have been a different answer.”

He talks about turning a corner into simplicity when the pandemic reached us in March 2020. His entire life was stripped away. He went from having tens of thousands of people screaming his songs back to him in concert to nothing for 18 months. “It was almost like solitary confinement. So, I have come out knowing that all the other stuff around me is absolutely nonsensical and the things that matter most to me are my family, my friends and the one that I love. That’s it. There’s nothing else in the world, bro.”

Ailish O’Donoghue passed away unexpectedly in February 2019. Her husband, Shay, had died suddenly at age 63 of a stomach aneurysm in 2008. In 2012, O’Donoghue told The Guardian: “He was talking to me in the morning, and he was dead by night time. I didn’t realise that I was getting precious time with my dad. I’d been away for 10 years. I got to know my father as a man. It was: ‘I know that he loves me, but does he like me?’”

Looking back now, what does he think of their relationship? “Only now, when I’m turning the age that he was when he had me, I feel like I know what he meant with a lot of the things he told me. The advice he gave me is only ringing true now. I’d love to ring him up now and say: ‘I’m so sorry for the shit I was doing as a kid.’

“But at the same time, my father was music through and through. He was a musician growing up. He was a child prodigy piano player. He was signed to a publishing company. I know now what it was like for him, because I’m trying to set up a publishing company and I’m trying to write for people and get out there and be a name as well. I realise just how alike we are, or we were. I think he’d like that I have managed to cultivate a career with The Script that will go down in Irish history in the field that he chose. And we did it in the right way. We did with the songs and the lyrics. We didn’t do it by falling out of clubs or by being famous for being famous. None of us have gone off the beaten track and done drugs.”

His parents were, he says, devout Catholics. He questioned his faith when his father died. “Because he went before his time. How dare God take him in his prime? You question your mortality. You question all of these things. And with those questions come answers. But, you’ve got to keep going. [Know] that there is a bigger plan. A better plan.”

He still believes in a higher power. “I pray to a thing upstairs. I don’t know if it’s a man, I don’t know if it’s woman. It’s a good thing to have an image to pray to, but to believe in man-made religion is pretty hard for me. I believe that my god loves everybody; he loves gay, straight, black, white, skinny, small, teeny, rich, poor — everybody.”

O’Donoghue is currently in a relationship, the details of which he would prefer to keep private. He does say that he would “love to be a father one day, absolutely. It’s probably the only thing missing from my life at this stage. If I can be blessed with a child, yes, I think I would make a good father. But to be a good father when I find a good mother. I don’t know if I have the skills to bring up a child on my own. I’ve got sisters who brought up kids on their own — I’ve got a lot of respect for them — but I know how hard it is, particularly in today’s day and age. I feel like I’ve a solid enough foundation now in my life and I can at least steer a kid in a right direction.”

O’Donoghue himself benefitted from a steer from Bono early in his career. In December 2008, The Script were due to perform in the US on The Late Show With David Letterman. “I was shit-scared of going on television for my first time in America. When we got into the dressing room, there was a crate of Guinness and the instructions on how to make a snakebite [a mix of beer/stout and cider]. There was also a card from Bono saying: ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us. So, I’m leaving.’ It thought it was a really classy thing to do.”

They had first met many years before — a much less classy affair. In the 1990s, O’Donoghue and Sheehan were members of boy band Mytown and signed to U2’s management team. “Paul McGuinness was managing us. We were brought out to Shelbourne Park. We’re all there putting a little bet on the dogs. Mark from my band sat beside The Edge, and I got put in the corner with the secretary or whoever. It wasn’t as glamorous as where Mark was. I was fuming.

“As they were bringing around the wine, I kept going, ‘Another glass! Another glass!’ Sitting there, fuming. ‘Another glass! Another glass!’ It came towards the end of the night where everyone was heading on to [U2’s nightclub] The Kitchen. Our band left first and U2 were behind us. Then I took one step. I took two steps… I took too many steps,” he laughs, “and I ended up falling down 12 steps on my knees. Fell into a big bag of bones down the bottom of the steps. I made an absolute show of myself. They all went off to The Kitchen and I was back home in bed by 11.30pm.”

Did Bono ever mention that night to him? “Never. I am hoping to god he never remembered it!”

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The Script in concert at the O2 in Dublin (now the 3Arena) in 2011. Photo by: Arthur Carron

In the late 1990s he and Sheehan lived for a time in LA. O’Donoghue remembers stealing bags of ice from the forecourts of petrol stations to use to keep their food cold because the electricity had been cut off due to lack of funds.

“What do I think of that young man in LA now?” He laughs. “I think, fair f**ks to him. He did whatever it took to get there. I was walking around, starving, sleeping on people’s couches.”

Today, he lives in an apartment above his recording studio in London. “If I can go to the ATM and pull out money, put a roof over my head and food on the table — job done. I’d have done all of the rest of it for free. I feel blessed I’ve made it through Covid-19 relatively unscathed. If there are any positives to come — and there’s f**k all, to be honest with you — it has made people realise they are with the right person or they are with the wrong person or they are living the right life, or they are living the wrong life. I feel like Covid has really crystalised what life is all about. In London, people are allowed back out again. What are we going back out to? What is so important that we are rushing back out to?

“I was on the road for 12 years before Covid-19. I’ll look back and think of the time I had curling up on the couch [during lockdowns] and getting to know the love of my life and getting to know me as a person, because I am extremely different than I was 12 years ago. I am still an open book, but I still feel I know nothing.” l 

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